Lenovo Thinkpad W700DS features slide-out 10.2-inch secondary display

Lenovo’s latest Thinkpad, the W700DS, is a beast: an 11 pound notebook with a NVIDIA Quadro mobile GPU, an Intel quad core processor, a 17-inch wide screen… and an additional 10.2-inch secondary LED display that slides out from the casing. This isn’t so much a laptop as a portable graphics workstation, and its cost is in line with that: when it comes out early next year, it’ll cost about $3,600.

#1: Haven’t heard rated battery life yet… but I suspect Lenovo’s aware of that issue and doing Something Moderately Reasonable.

On the other hand, there’s a definite market for machines which are portable and can run for two or three hours on battery but are meant primarily to run off wall power. The gamers established that genre, but in fact it’s good for a lot of business applications too, especially now that trains and planes provide power outlets. My own primary “work” machine (also a Lenovo, so I’m somewhat biased) only runs on battery during meetings, power outages (call it a built-in UPS), and to keep memory refreshed while it’s in suspend mode.

And at some point, if the machine’s powerful enough and you actually NEED that power, it may be worth considering carrying an external gel-cell battery pack…

But slightly disappointing — I optimistically read “slide-out display” as a second screen you can slide out and pass around the room: now THAT would be something.

Anyway, why aren’t people creating more snap-on, simple, 7″ or 10″ displays for laptops? And can monitors be plugged into USB ports? In the future? That would make cheap generic displays much more likely.